I have a cousin who grew up on Windows NT 4.0, of all OSes. Now that's odd.

XP was something though, using it as my main OS for over 11 years. I thought that it would never be obsolete (if you try hard enough it still isn't). I only saw Vista installed on one desktop back when it was current so it came and went like nothing. Even Windows 7 feels like a footnote compared to the long chapter of XP.

Maybe in 2050, Windows 7 will feel like something that ran on terminals with green monochrome screens. And Vista will be landfill fodder.

And the OS war will have been decided in favour of the stuff on the disc in the box on my avatar. Hopefully.

Vista came out when I was a senior in high school. I remember watching the builds of longhorn and hoping they would make it better when it came out, but they never did. After the RTM release came out, we tried getting it running on a computer in my IT class and I just remember having a lot of trouble getting it working. Then for the next year or so, the standard practice was to uninstall Vista and install XP.

Then around 2009 some time, I had built a new machine for a friend and when I shipped it out, I put XP on it, but I couldn't help testing Vista on it before it left my care and I was surprised at how smooth it ran. My experiences with it had been so poor previously but that was because the hardware I was trying it on just wasn't up to the task. But the new machine handled it very well and I remember thinking that perhaps I had misjudged Vista. But then 7 came out shortly after and everyone pretty much agreed to forget about Vista and embrace 7.

I was curious about Vista lately and put it on a C2D E6700 2.66 GHz / 4 GB DDR2 / GF210 (actually one of the infamous "Vista ready" machines with some upgrades). It runs as well as XP and the GUI is responsive, as opposed to a clean Windows 10 1803 install where there was a lag of a few seconds.

Croat, hate is such a strong word, I just avoided it, because I felt, it was not made for me

If you had a Athlon 1400 with 512MB RAM running with XP for years, faster and more responsive than a Core2Duo with 4GB RAM running Vista you will understand

About bugs and failures I can't tell much, because I never really used it...

It was pre-loaded with a lot of bullshit from Asus, so i immediately reinstalled without that stuff, but there was no notable difference.
IIRC correctly it was an Asus X50SL laptop.

The same with my moped...
My 2 stroke Hercules GT felt like running away below my ass when starting again at a crossroad after waiting (50ccm, 25km/h max).
The 4 stroke china-cracker (scooter) from Kymco (50ccm/50km/h max) I could hold stopped by putting my foot on the street while giving full speed on the handle bar...
I tried this with my Hercules, it pulled itself out of below my ass, felt on the floor and I was falling on it, burning my right hand while trying to catch my fall against the motor...

Wow, actually I never expected someone's first OS to be Vista
How did you feel the OS?

I never understood why people hated it,it ran great for me and didn't run into any bugs.
My first OS was Vista because i was born in 2005

I don't remember correctly,but i had an intel dual core and a GeForce 7800 GTX.

It was a matter of timing, really. With new driver models and security improvements such as UAC, it was a huge adjustment from XP. Early adopters were kind of screwed over by it because the hardware and software support wasn't fully there yet. There were a lot of programs people used on XP that wouldn't work on Vista or wouldn't work properly on Vista and lots of hardware that lacked drivers that would run on Vista.

After a couple of years, these issues got sorted out. People upgraded hardware and the support from vendors arrived and it really wasn't too bad after that. But unfortunately, the damage was done and 7 was just around the corner. So 7 got all the glory as it benefited greatly from the growing pains we went through with Vista.

My first OS was MS-DOS 3.2 running on an ancient Columbia VP portable computer. Yeah, right, "portable". The size of a briefcase and much to heavy to make any sense.
I moved to an Amiga 500 with Workbench 1.3 before going back to MS-DOS, this time version 6.21 (Yep, somewhat strange version, came with AST systems in the 90's) on a 486, and I've stayed with x86 since.

And for those who are discussing Vista: Vista was very unfairly treated in the press. When I swapped from a single-core Athlon 64 running XP to a Dell XPS laptop with Core 2 Duo and Vista, it felt like a big leap forward. The user experience was great. UAC could be tweaked, so I never really understood what all the jokes were about. It ran very stable for years and my XPS is still going strong (as a backup system), with Vista.

@sdose yes, I know. I remember seeing in my childhood lots of XP machines, even some 2000 ones (no Vista ones), and I remember seeing the Windows 7 machines as new, not even Windows 8 was released.

@Croat it's interesting that your first PC was a Vista one, because at your age of 5, Win7 was already out, and Vista wasn't really popular. I never imagined actually someone's first computer's OS would be Vista, I rather thought in XP and/or 7

I think the main problem with Vista was, as previously @BlueSun, @win32, @sdose and now @Becks have said, the hard jump Vista was from XP. The world just wasn't ready, and I think Vista, just like Longhorn, was ahead of its time, with the incompatibilities introduces due to codebase modifications, the high Vista hardware needs with poor hardware, so people couldn't adopt it quite well, mainly because of slowdowns, which ruin the user experience.

Windows Vista was not that bad of an OS. I actually have a PC with Vista, and it seems to work fine, although it has been a bit slower than it used to be, but that could just be because of it being unsupported. I remember back in late 2016, I couldn't use Google Chrome very well on this Vista machine as it kept crashing, and I was stuck using IE for surfing the web. But in March 2017 I reinstalled Vista using the recovery disk that came with the PC, and everything started working fine again. So yes, Vista was a fine OS, but with just a tiny bit of bugs and some features that needed a tiny bit of improvement.

Oh, and to get to what this topic is about, my first OS was Windows 98, which I used on an older PC I still have.

I'm starting to understand the Vista hate; especially with regards to my USB DVD-RW drive. I had no issues using it in Windows 95, 2000, XP, 7 and Ubuntu but any attempts to access it on my Vista SP2 machine result in a BSoD.

Today's stuff in school also includes social media and other things, that need a lot of computing power.
For learning typing such a computer still would be okay.
As teachers dont require horrendous payments per hour for fixing/installing/updating systems they can save a lot of money (that they certainly dont have) this way. Also building "new" office-boxes from scrap parts saves them a lot of money.

On the other hand teachers are usually no IT-experts, they do what they're able to and don't have much time for keeping their knowledge up to date.
In 1996 our school had two computer-classrooms, each equipped with ~25 computers. One had shiny new Windows 95 computers connected to the internet and also had a server that provided virtual disk images for a lot of learning programs, encarta, ...
After a few weeks the seller's technician had to completly reinstall everything, because it was totally shut down by virus activity. The teacher always telling us about how dangerous these are and claiming he's the boss of security was just a "bigmouth".
All schools I went to after this one had similiar problems.

With this in mind it may be really dangerous to use old systems in schools.

The other computer room in that school had 286 and 386 boxes running DOS6.22 and Windows 3.1 (which was a pirated copy, the teacher who did this+other copies got kicked out later).
We went there starting in 4th grade to learn typing in DOS with EDIT. These computers ran there until 2002. My brother brought one when they went to trash.

It has 120MB hard disk full of old games, he has it in his basement ready to play, but I think hasn't touched it for years.

Computers in schools these days are managed by IT departments and they get discounts for the licensing. Most IT departments will prefer to have the latest supported OSes not only for security, but mostly for being able to call on Microsoft or whatever vendor for support. They'd rather just dial a number and have it get fixed than trying to do it themselves.

@BlueSun said:
Computers in schools these days are managed by IT departments and they get discounts for the licensing. Most IT departments will prefer to have the latest supported OSes not only for security, but mostly for being able to call on Microsoft or whatever vendor for support. They'd rather just dial a number and have it get fixed than trying to do it themselves.

In that sense, I believe my old school may be using Win10 now, even though most other computer networks still hang on to 7 as far as I know.

Also @HontNog, you've somehow borked with my quote. What were you trying to say to me?

@BlueSun said:
Only because corporate IT moves slower than molasses. But once 7 is out of support next year, they'll definitely move to Windows 10.

Don't suppose they'll move to LTSB, would they?

No. LTSB is meant for kiosks and the like. For the big enterprise networks, there's enterprise edition and schools will use the Education edition. Although I'm sure there'll be exceptions. For the most part though, they'll use whatever license is supported for their use case.

RSTS/E version 7 on a PDP 11/70 with a DECwriter terminal. A DECwriter was like a printer with a keyboard (no screen, only paper). RSTS was a time sharing OS that I used in a Basic language programming class.

I'm 35. First OS I had at home was plain DOS 5 on an XT clone, not long after that I had a 486 with DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1 - that was brand new install from the store. It was a display model and had been messed with, and as a young 10 year old I managed to figure out (with help from the library) how to format and reinstall DOS and Windows - fortunately it came with the driver and OS floppies.

My first exposure to computers was in elementary school with C64 and Apple II machines, and some MacOS - probably 6 or 7 at the time.

I also would often use the library computers which were Wyse serial terminals connected to a machine running some flavor of Unix - I don't know which it was. In the early/mid 90s you could create a user account and have access to primitive web, gopher, Usenet, and email through the library terminals, and could apply for a dial-in account as well - it wasn't dialup internet but instead you used a terminal emulator to dial in to the library's Unix system and would get the same menu-driven shell that you used at the library. It had lynx, pine, and some sort of restricted shell. Pretty cool to mess around with around 93-94 when I was starting to learn about Unix and the internet.

Only a couple years later I had Linux and FreeBSD running at home, something I never thought I'd have just a few years before. It took days to download the basic set of Redhat 5 RPMs over FTP on a 28.8k modem, and I couldn't fit them all on a floppy so I believe I installed a second hard drive just to hold the RPMs for the installer - the days before CD writers being common.